Pinboard (jm)
https://pinboard.in/u:jm/public/
recent bookmarks from jmGeorge Monbiot on UK climate politics2023-08-02T11:53:54+00:00
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/aug/01/rishi-sunak-north-sea-planet-climate-crisis-plutocrats
jmbusiness economics climate-change george-monbiot uk carbon politics uk-politicshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:ac079e943e50/Report claims super funds are lying to their members on climate risk - Michael West2023-07-28T09:44:13+00:00
https://michaelwest.com.au/report-claims-super-funds-are-lying-to-their-members-on-climate-risk/
jmFor several years, [Steve] Keen has been a vociferous critic of mainstream climate economics. He certainly pulled no punches with a 2020 paper, titled 'The Appallingly Bad Neoclassical Economics of Climate Change'. He describes this strand of climate economics as “easily the worst work I have read in half a century”.
These economists “don’t deny that climate change is happening,” Keen told MWM, “but they effectively deny that it really matters.”
One of Keen’s primary targets is William Nordhaus, who won the 2018 Nobel Prize in economics for his work on climate economics and has been a major influence in his discipline. Nordhaus has claimed that a 6-degree increase in global temperature would cause global gross domestic product to fall by less than 10 per cent.
Figures like this stand in stark contrast to the view of most climate scientists, who warn of massive, catastrophic risks from anything over 2°C.
The economists “are doing impeccable econometrics on stupid f..king numbers that they’ve made up that bear no relation whatsoever to the catastrophe we’re approaching,” Keen told MWM via email.
]]>economics steve-keen climate-change science william-nordhaushttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:be45584a5fbc/Loading the DICE Against Pensions - Carbon Tracker Initiative2023-07-27T09:32:02+00:00
https://carbontracker.org/reports/loading-the-dice-against-pensions/
jmEconomists have claimed, in refereed economics papers, that 6°C of global warming will reduce future global GDP by less than 10%, compared to what GDP would have been in the complete absence of climate change.
In contrast, scientists have claimed, in refereed science papers, that 5°C of global warming implies damages that are “beyond catastrophic, including existential threats,” while even 1°C of warming — which we have already passed — could trigger dangerous climate tipping points.
This results in a huge disconnect between what scientists expect from global warming, and what pensioners/investors/financial systems are prepared for.
Consequently, a wealth-damaging correction or “Minsky Moment” cannot be ruled out, and is virtually inevitable.
]]>economics climate-change pensions future gdphttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:de269b65f246/The Gig Economy Is White People Discovering Servants | by Indi Samarajiva2020-12-01T12:04:58+00:00
https://medium.com/indica/the-gig-economy-is-white-people-discovering-servants-d0bd47b154a
jmThis century the vaunted American middle class has bottomed out and the place has started to look more like the ‘developing’ world, with a definite underclass. However, lacking generations of feudal tradition and clinging to the myth of being a classless society, Americans couldn’t just bring servants into their homes. So venture capitalists did it for them.
Uber and Postmates and DoorDash and all of these ‘gig’ economy companies simply created a giant pool of servants that you could call on demand. That’s all they really do. The gig economy is just a giant collection of servants.
]]>inequality economics servants america gig-economy class uber postmates doordashhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:51e53d7ba6f3/Proactive screening for COVID-19 is individually costly2020-09-07T13:26:25+00:00
https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1302706766656884736
jm[...] proactive testing carries individual costs: those associated with purchasing the tests, time costs of taking them, and serious social and economic costs if one tests positive and has to self-isolate for upward of a week. So, we have an intervention that is costly to you but beneficial to others. We need to think about what the incentives are for people to (1) decide to take a daily test before the results are known and (2) follow through appropriately if a test comes up positive.
]]>testing covid-19 screening costs economics incentiveshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:3394abaa5a68/The Climate Case for a Jobs Guarantee2020-06-09T13:56:05+00:00
https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/articles/2020-06-05/the-climate-case-for-a-jobs-guarantee-kim-stanley-robinson
jmIt would mean that governments would set a higher minimum wage than ever before, and if that minimum were a true living wage, private enterprise would have to match it to attract workers. And then, suddenly, everyone would be both employed and making a decent living. Private enterprises would therefore have more prosperous customers, and all would then rise in a virtuous cycle. Given the immense stresses that climate change is sure to bring, finding useful work for people would not be a problem. There will be a lot to do. Recall that 5% unemployment is often said to be the “natural” level, such that markets get nervous when the jobless rate goes lower than that. Unemployment at 5% is said to create “wage pressure,” which it definitely does, because millions of people are thereby living in fear and will take any job they can get, even ones that don’t pay enough for a secure life. The phrase “wage pressure” is yet another indication of how markets exert power to keep power. In this context, a Job Guarantee would erase wage pressure (meaning fear and misery), and the less fearful and more productive populace that resulted might thrive in a feeling of security.
]]>jobs work unemployment economics economy qe future ksr scifi climate-changehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:d5ce481f6463/Kim Stanley Robinson proposing "carbon quantitative easing"2020-04-29T14:06:50+00:00
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-04-22/kim-stanley-robinson-let-the-fed-print-money-for-the-planet
jmfinance carbon climate-change kim-stanley-robinson economics quantative-easing future green-recoveryhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:89250c9ce882/Trees on commercial UK plantations 'not helping climate crisis'2020-03-10T14:34:12+00:00
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/mar/10/uk-commercial-tree-plantations-ineffective-climate-crisis-report
jm“There is no point growing a lot of fast-growing conifers with the logic that they sequester carbon quickly if they then go into a paper mill because all that carbon will be lost to the atmosphere within a few years,” said Thomas Lancaster, head of UK land policy at the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), which commissioned the report. “We should not be justifying non-native forestry on carbon grounds if it’s not being used as a long-term carbon store.”
Absolutely. Commercial forestry is not going to help address the climate change problem.]]>business economics environment climate-change forestry trees coilltehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:e20d85ca43c3/COP-25 Report from Prof. John Sweeney of An Taisce2019-12-16T13:14:23+00:00
https://www.antaisce.org/Sweeney-COP25-Final
jmThere is no doubt but that the failure of COP25 is symptomatic of a world failing to advance the multilateralism ideals many of us grew up with. International cooperation in economics, politics and in solving environmental problems, such as ozone depletion, have now given way to narrow national and populist ideologies. What is most worrying about current developments in tackling climate change is however the disconnect between the power brokers and society at large. The advice of the scientists and the pleas of the young were ignored in Madrid. Indeed some 200 young people were summarily ejected from the conference after a protest, and the eloquent arguments presented by the young Irish activists at several side events fell on deaf ears. Attempts by some world leaders and some media commentators to direct personal vitriol against young activists even surfaced.
]]>cop25 world future climate-change economics politics failhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:9b1787e7f091/Open Source Could Be a Casualty of the Trade War2019-06-24T10:08:50+00:00
https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=5590
jmideologically, a core tenant of open source is non-discriminatory empowerment. When I was introduced to open source in the 90’s, the chief “bad guy” was Microsoft – people wanted to defend against “embrace, extend, extinguish” corporate practices, and by homesteading on the technological frontier with GNU/Linux we were ensuring that our livelihoods, independence, and security would never be beholden to a hostile corporate power.
Now, the world has changed. Our open source code may end up being labeled as enabling a “foreign adversary”. I never suspected that I could end up on the “wrong side” of politics by being a staunch advocate of open source, but here I am. My open source mission is to empower people to be technologically independent; to know that technology is not magic, so that nobody will ever be a slave to technology. This is true even if that means resisting my own government. The erosion of freedom starts with restricting access to “foreign adversaries”, and ends with the government arbitrarily picking politically convenient winners and losers to participate in the open source ecosystem.
Freedom means freedom, and I will stand to defend it.
Now that the US is carpet-bombing Huawei’s supply chain, I fear there is no turning back. The language already written into EO13873 sets the stage to threaten open source as a whole by drawing geopolitical and national security borders over otherwise non-discriminatory development efforts. While I still hold hope that the trade war could de-escalate, the proliferation and stockpiling of powerful anti-trade weapons like EO13873 is worrisome. Now is the time to raise awareness of the threat this poses to the open source world, so that we can prepare and come together to protect the freedoms we cherish the most.
I hope, in all earnestness, that open source shall not be a casualty of this trade war.
]]>open-source business china economics huawei us-politics trade-war oss gnu linuxhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:56e3429e0c97/Risky business: linking _Toxoplasma gondii_ infection and entrepreneurship behaviours across individuals and countries | Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences2019-01-02T15:54:24+00:00
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rspb.2018.0822
jmUsing a saliva-based assay, we found that students (n = 1495) who tested IgG positive for Toxoplasma gondii exposure were 1.4× more likely to major in business and 1.7× more likely to have an emphasis in ‘management and entrepreneurship' over other business-related emphases. Among professionals attending entrepreneurship events, T. gondii-positive individuals were 1.8× more likely to have started their own business compared with other attendees (n = 197). Finally, after synthesizing and combining country-level databases on T. gondii infection from the past 25 years with the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor of entrepreneurial activity, we found that infection prevalence was a consistent, positive predictor of entrepreneurial activity and intentions at the national scale, regardless of whether previously identified economic covariates were included. Nations with higher infection also had a lower fraction of respondents citing ‘fear of failure' in inhibiting new business ventures. While correlational, these results highlight the linkage between parasitic infection and complex human behaviours, including those relevant to business, entrepreneurship and economic productivity.
]]>science biology infection toxoplasmosis parasites humans behaviour entrepreneurs business brains economicshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:d60371f8ab12/Online mattress-in-a-box brands: Why are there so many? - Curbed2018-04-04T09:08:05+00:00
https://www.curbed.com/2018/3/28/17164898/bed-in-a-box-online-mattress-brands-why-so-many
jm“People ask me what it takes to get into this space,” said Bryan Murphy, founder and president of Tomorrow Sleep. “If you have a [Google] AdWords account [to buy digital ads] and you know a subcontractor, you can sell a mattress online.”
]]>mattresses business economics retail adwords onlinehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:dcbc38172550/Dark forces, Brexit and Irexit2017-08-01T11:34:13+00:00
https://brianmlucey.wordpress.com/2017/07/09/dark-forces-and-brexit/
jmThe EU have made it clear, as they have to, that there will be no frictionless borders between the union and the UK. Brexit will be dislocative. As smaller irish companies start to go to the wall post Brexit expect the calls for “something to be done” to start to include Irexit [an Irish exit from the EU a la Brexit]. But this way madness lies. [...]
we export more in education services than in beverages ; we exportthree times or more manufactured goods than food; we export six times more in chemicals and related; value added by industry or by distribution and transport is more than 10 times that of agriculture. Seeking Irexit on the basis that it would be good for agribusiness is seeking to amputate a hand for a broken finger.
]]>agribusiness ireland irexit brexit economics eu politicshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:72034b0ae42d/ECB forcing Ireland to pay the bondholders was like a hostage situation | David McWilliams2016-01-29T14:10:36+00:00
http://www.davidmcwilliams.ie/2016/01/28/ecb-forcing-ireland-to-pay-the-bondholders-was-like-a-hostage-situation
jmAt the time, many of us citizens thought the State was being craven in the face of the EU but it is now clear that Trichet’s ECB was prepared to let the Irish banks go to the wall, prompting a new bank run in 2010. This is like a hostage situation. The ECB was saying to the Irish government: you managed in September 2008 to prevent a bank run with the guarantee (which should always have been temporary and conditional) but now we are going to threaten you with another bank run – because we are still funding your banks and you must pay all the bondholders and add the cost to the national debt of the country. So the implicit threat was: “We will close the banks, cause a bank run and you will be left to pick up the pieces politically, socially and economically.”
]]>banking ireland politics ecb eu bondholders jean-claude-trichet economicshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:d69056ae6ca0/Tim O'Reilly vs Paul Graham: fight!2016-01-26T10:47:30+00:00
https://medium.com/the-wtf-economy/in-his-essay-on-income-inequality-paul-graham-credited-me-for-pre-publication-feedback-ff8a0b295a1b#.ifk3uil78
jm'In his essay on Income Inequality, Paul Graham credited me for pre-publication feedback. Because he didn’t do much with my comments, I thought I’d publish them here.'
... 'Mostly, I think you are picking a fight with people who would mostly agree with you, and ignoring the real arguments about what inequality means and why it matters.'
]]>inequality silicon-valley tech paul-graham tim-oreilly piketty politics economics wealth startups history work stock-optionshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:b5c2af032e83/New study shows Spain’s “Google tax” has been a disaster for publishers2015-08-05T12:46:43+00:00
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/07/new-study-shows-spains-google-tax-has-been-a-disaster-for-publishers/
jmA study commissioned by Spanish publishers has found that a new intellectual property law passed in Spain last year, which charges news aggregators like Google for showing snippets and linking to news stories, has done substantial damage to the Spanish news industry.
In the short-term, the study found, the law will cost publishers €10 million, or about $10.9 million, which would fall disproportionately on smaller publishers. Consumers would experience a smaller variety of content, and the law "impedes the ability of innovation to enter the market." The study concludes that there's no "theoretical or empirical justification" for the fee.
]]>google news publishing google-tax spain law aggregation snippets economicshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:cbaed4a17c76/Angela Merkel told a sobbing girl she couldn't save her from deportation. It was a lie. - Vox2015-07-17T12:42:37+00:00
http://www.vox.com/2015/7/17/8980161/angela-merkel-crying-girl
jmArgentina has, as a matter of constitutional law, effectively open borders. There are no caps or quotas or lottery systems. You can move there legally if you have an employer or family member to sponsor you. That's all you need. If you don't have a sponsor, and make your way in illegally, you're recognized as an "irregular migrant." Discrimination against irregular migrants in health care or education is illegal, and deportation in noncriminal cases is exceptionally rare. Large-scale amnesties are the norm.
Obviously Argentina is not nearly as rich as Germany or the US or the UK. But it's considerably richer than three of its neighbors (Bolivia, Paraguay, and Brazil). And yet it doesn't try hard to keep their residents out. It welcomes them — as it should. "One could have expected catastrophe—an uncontrollable flow of poorer immigrants streaming into the country coupled with angry public backlash," Elizabeth Slater writes in the World Policy Journal. "That hasn't happened."
Angela Merkel clearly expects catastrophe if she lets people like this weeping young Palestinian girl stay in Germany. That catastrophe is simply a myth; it wouldn't happen. What would happen is that Germany's economy would grow, its culture would grow richer, and that girl and more like her could see their lives improve immeasurably.
]]>argentina immigration angela-merkel germany eu migrants deportation economicshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:7dfdc15557c1/'Can People Distinguish Pâté from Dog Food?'2015-05-17T22:29:08+00:00
http://www.wine-economics.org/workingpapers/AAWE_WP36.pdf
jm
Considering the similarity of its ingredients, canned dog food could be a suitable and
inexpensive substitute for pâté or processed blended meat products such as Spam or
liverwurst. However, the social stigma associated with the human consumption of pet
food makes an unbiased comparison challenging. To prevent bias, Newman's Own dog
food was prepared with a food processor to have the texture and appearance of a liver
mousse. In a double-blind test, subjects were presented with five unlabeled blended meat
products, one of which was the prepared dog food. After ranking the samples on the basis
of taste, subjects were challenged to identify which of the five was dog food. Although
72% of subjects ranked the dog food as the worst of the five samples in terms of taste
(Newell and MacFarlane multiple comparison, P<0.05), subjects were not better than
random at correctly identifying the dog food. ]]>pate food omgwtf science research dog-food meat economics taste flavourhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:498431253dd5/How Paul Graham Is Wrong2014-12-30T16:47:46+00:00
http://ma.tt/2014/12/how-paul-graham-is-wrong/
jmIf 95% of great programmers aren’t in the US, and an even higher percentage not in the Bay Area, set up your company to take advantage of that fact as a strength, not a weakness. Use WordPress and P2, use Slack, use G+ Hangouts, use Skype, use any of the amazing technology that allows us to collaborate as effectively online as previous generations of company did offline. Let people live someplace remarkable instead of paying $2,800 a month for a mediocre one bedroom rental in San Francisco. Or don’t, and let companies like Automattic and Github hire the best and brightest and let them live and work wherever they like.
]]>business remote-work economics silicon-valley bay-area vcs matt-mullenweg automattic workhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:63ea4f8f6ec2/Inside a Chinese Bitcoin Mine2014-08-18T16:14:20+00:00
http://www.thecoinsman.com/2014/08/bitcoin/inside-chinese-bitcoin-mine/
jmThe mining operation resides on an old, repurposed factory floor, and contains 2500 machines hashing away at 230 Gh/s, each. (That’s 230 billion calculations per second, per unit). [...] The operators told me that the power bill of this specific operation is in excess of ¥400,000 per month [..] about $60,000 USD.
]]>currency china economics bitcoin power environment green mining datacentershttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:cd7b0697fdfc/Cory Doctorow on Thomas Piketty's 'Capital in the 21st Century'2014-06-30T16:47:17+00:00
http://boingboing.net/2014/06/24/thomas-pikettys-capital-in-t.html
jmhistory capitalism economics piketty capital finance taxation growth money cory-doctorow thomas-pikettyhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:bce1db32c25e/Alex Payne — Bitcoin, Magical Thinking, and Political Ideology2013-12-19T10:18:31+00:00
https://al3x.net/2013/12/18/bitcoin.html
jmWorking in technology has an element of pioneering, and with new frontiers come those would prefer to leave civilization behind. But in a time of growing inequality, we need technology that preserves and renews the civilization we already have. The first step in this direction is for technologists to engage with the experiences and struggles of those outside their industry and community. There’s a big, wide, increasingly poor world out there, and it doesn’t need 99% of what Silicon Valley is selling.
I’ve enjoyed the thought experiment of Bitcoin as much as the next nerd, but it’s time to dispense with the opportunism and adolescent fantasies of a crypto-powered stateless future and return to the work of building technology and social services that meaningfully and accountably improve our collective quality of life.
]]>bitcoin business economics silicon-valley tech alex-payne writing libertarianism futurism crypto civilization frontier communityhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:191f7d3cf194/Bitcoin Mining Operating Margin2013-10-17T21:39:59+00:00
http://blockchain.info/charts/miners-operating-profit-margin
jmbitcoin via:peakscale economics mining profit revenue charts electricity bubblehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:d06a6f0076ee/Being poor changes your thinking about everything2013-09-15T22:34:45+00:00
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/09/13/being-poor-changes-your-thinking-about-everything/?tid=pm_pop
jmThe scarcity trap captures this notion we see again and again in many domains. When people have very little, they undertake behaviors that maintain or reinforce their future disadvantage. If you have very little, you often behave in such a way so that you'll have little in the future. In economics, people talk about the poverty trap. We're generalizing that, saying this happens a lot, and we've experienced it.
]]>poor poverty society economics scarcity washington-posthttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:ed0bf98c3387/High home ownership can seriously damage labor market, new study suggests2013-05-27T11:00:15+00:00
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/05/130507060845.htm
jmscience home-ownership rental homes usa economicshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:305670c53e62/The Why2013-04-24T12:15:45+00:00
http://www.broadsheet.ie/2013/04/24/the-why/#comment-541514
jm“The overall argument is that the Irish media are part and parcel of the political and corporate establishment, and as such the news they convey tend to reflect those sectors’ interests and views. In particular, the Celtic Tiger years involved the financialisation of the economy and a large property bubble, all of it wrapped in an implicit neoliberal ideology. The media, embedded within this particular political economy and itself a constitutive element of it, thus mostly presented stories sustaining it. In particular, news organisations acquired direct stakes in an inflated real estate market by purchasing property websites and receiving vital advertising revenue from the real estate sector. Moreover, a number of their board members were current or former high officials in the finance industry and government, including banks deeply involved in the bubble’s expansion."
]]>economics irish-times ireland newspapers media elite insiders bubble property-bubble property celtic-tiger papers news biashttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:9091d370ea58/The Excel Depression - NYTimes.com2013-04-20T22:10:04+00:00
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/19/opinion/krugman-the-excel-depression.html?_r=0
jmWhat the Reinhart-Rogoff affair shows is the extent to which austerity has been sold on false pretenses. For three years, the turn to austerity has been presented not as a choice but as a necessity. Economic research, austerity advocates insisted, showed that terrible things happen once debt exceeds 90 percent of G.D.P. But “economic research” showed no such thing; a couple of economists made that assertion, while many others disagreed. Policy makers abandoned the unemployed and turned to austerity because they wanted to, not because they had to. So will toppling Reinhart-Rogoff from its pedestal change anything? I’d like to think so. But I predict that the usual suspects will just find another dubious piece of economic analysis to canonize, and the depression will go on and on.
]]>paul-krugman economics excel coding bugs software austerity debthttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:7a3224fcd6d6/How Kaggle Is Changing How We Work - Thomas Goetz - The Atlantic2013-04-18T14:28:12+00:00
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/04/how-kaggle-is-changing-how-we-work/274908/
jm
Founded in 2010, Kaggle is an online platform for data-mining and predictive-modeling competitions. A company arranges with Kaggle to post a dump of data with a proposed problem, and the site's community of computer scientists and mathematicians -- known these days as data scientists -- take on the task, posting proposed solutions.
[...] On one level, of course, Kaggle is just another spin on crowdsourcing, tapping the global brain to solve a big problem. That stuff has been around for a decade or more, at least back to Wikipedia (or farther back, Linux, etc). And companies like TaskRabbit and oDesk have thrown jobs to the crowd for several years. But I think Kaggle, and other online labor markets, represent more than that, and I'll offer two arguments. First, Kaggle doesn't incorporate work from all levels of proficiency, professionals to amateurs. Participants are experts, and they aren't working for benevolent reasons alone: they want to win, and they want to get better to improve their chances of winning next time. Second, Kaggle doesn't just create the incidental work product, it creates a new marketplace for work, a deeper disruption in a professional field. Unlike traditional temp labor, these aren't bottom of the totem pole jobs. Kagglers are on top. And that disruption is what will kill Joy's Law.
Because here's the thing: the Kaggle ranking has become an essential metric in the world of data science. Employers like American Express and the New York Times have begun listing a Kaggle rank as an essential qualification in their help wanted ads for data scientists. It's not just a merit badge for the coders; it's a more significant, more valuable, indicator of capability than our traditional benchmarks for proficiency or expertise. In other words, your Ivy League diploma and IBM resume don't matter so much as my Kaggle score. It's flipping the resume, where your work is measurable and metricized and your value in the marketplace is more valuable than the place you work.
]]>academia datamining economics data kaggle data-science ranking work competition crowdsourcing contractinghttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:60b71d4213ae/Austerity policies founded on Excel typo2013-04-16T17:03:25+00:00
http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/04/16/reinhart_rogoff_coding_error_austerity_policies_founded_on_bad_coding.html
jmYou've probably heard that countries with a high debt:GDP ratio suffer from slow economic growth. The specific number 90 percent has been invoked frequently. That's all thanks to a study conducted by Carmen Reinhardt and Kenneth Rogoff for their book This Time It's Different. But the results have been difficult for other researchers to replicate. Now three scholars at the University of Massachusetts have done so in "Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth? A Critique of Reinhart and Rogoff" and they find that the Reinhart/Rogoff result is based on opportunistic exclusion of Commonwealth data in the late-1940s, a debatable premise about how to weight the data, and most of all a sloppy Excel coding error.
Read Mike Konczal for the whole rundown, but I'll just focus on the spreadsheet part. At one point they set cell L51 equal to AVERAGE(L30:L44) when the correct procuedure was AVERAGE(L30:L49). By typing wrong, they accidentally left Denmark, Canada, Belgium, Austria, and Australia out of the average. When you run the math correctly "the average real GDP growth rate for countries carrying a public debt-to-GDP ratio of over 90 percent is actually 2.2 percent, not -0.1 percent."
]]>austerity politics excel coding errors bugs spreadsheets economics economyhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:b2ded17573ca/21 graphs that show America’s health-care prices are ludicrous2013-03-27T12:01:47+00:00
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/03/26/21-graphs-that-show-americas-health-care-prices-are-ludicrous/
jmhealthcare costs economics us-politics world comparison graphs charts data via:hn americahttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:357f5606c58c/What Happens to Stolen Bicycles?2012-08-31T22:06:06+00:00
http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/30393216796/what-happens-to-stolen-bicycles
jmvia:hn economics crime bikes theft goldman-sachshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:bfe2ffd41f01/Why I'm Voting "No" to the Fiscal Compact2012-03-07T00:11:06+00:00
http://cormaclucey.blogspot.com/2012/03/why-im-voting-no-to-fiscal-compact.html
jmfiscal-compact ireland europe eu cormac-lucey economics bailouthttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:5be9b1f0111b/Does Online Piracy Hurt The Economy? A Look At The Numbers - Forbes2012-01-22T21:10:42+00:00
http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2012/01/21/does-online-piracy-hurt-the-economy-a-look-at-the-numbers/
jmpiracy forbes filesharing politics sopa economics lawhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:832fed583be8/Why should we stop online piracy? - opinion - 19 January 2012 - New Scientist2012-01-22T21:09:37+00:00
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21373-why-should-we-stop-online-piracy.html?full=true
jmpiracy new-scientist slate sopa filesharing dead-weight-loss economics music movieshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:47074ad8f905/an ex-Skype employee dishes the dirt on their buyout and acquisition2011-06-28T21:01:53+00:00
http://framethink.wordpress.com/2011/06/24/how-employees-get-screwed-in-private-equity-deals/
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/nov/20/eric-cantona-bank-protest-campaign
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